by
Hari Kunzru
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Each night, Rei waited until I had finished in the bathroom, before taking her shower and brushing her teeth. I would go into my own room and close the door. Then I’d hear her slippered feet in the corridor outside. I slept badly, another side effect of my medication, but I never left the room. Since I found it hard to concentrate on reading, and I didn’t want to make Rei nervous by wandering around the apartment, I spent my insomniac hours in an activity that I would have sneered at just a few months previously, filling in elaborate mandala patterns in one of those “adult” coloring books that are marketed as tools for stress relief. It was a pointless task (in general I’ve never liked doing anything “just to pass the time”) and it made me feel like a prisoner whiling away his sentence doing weaving or scrimshaw, but I persisted. I was determined to get well, to be normal. Whatever it took to come back home.
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Every so often, Rei and I tried to talk, with mixed results. I’ve always found it hard to speak on cue about my emotions. I am an articulate person, but only about things that don’t touch me. As soon as someone asks what I feel, I get confused. I don’t have the immediate access to my feelings that seems, to my eternal amazement, to be the birthright of most human beings. What question could be more profound than how are you? It feels lazy to say just any old thing, so I look inside myself and invariably this is a terrible idea. Searching for feelings is like being the lookout on a ship, shining a lantern into thick fog. Objects that appear close at hand recede into the murk, or reveal themselves as chimeras. Somewhere off the port bow are icebergs. At any rate, it takes me a great deal of time to formulate a response, and to the questioner it must seem as if I’ve been struck dumb. [...]
[...] Let’s just hold each other, she said. So we did, lying under the covers, our bodies molded together, big spoon and little spoon. Gradually her breathing became deeper and more regular and I realized that she’d fallen asleep. I stroked her shoulder and felt a vast gulf between us, formed out of all the days when we had not been together, the days of my absence and the days before I knew her, when she had said and done things I would never find out about. I could touch her, brush my fingers over her skin, but it was like touching the surface of some mysterious ancient stone. Inside, Rei stretched away to infinity, a galaxy of unseen stars.
a little cliched but i kind of like it
How do you camouflage despair? If I tell the truth, I suspect that I’ll set myself on the yellow brick road back to the clinic. But if I don’t tell the truth to her, someone who is paid to listen, then what hope do I have of finding a way through the selva oscura? Why do you think you find it so hard to speak plainly, the therapist often asks. She tells me not to make allusions, to try to talk directly about myself, without filtering what I say through references to books or films or art. She says she doesn’t care about my references. I say I don’t know how to speak any other way, it is how I understand myself. These references are my work, what I do. She says it’s deflection, a form of resistance. I can run down the clock by talking about Kleist or Chinese scholar’s rocks, but I won’t get any better. I am trying, she says, to present myself as the expert, instead of the patient. It is a thing a lot of her male clients do. I say I don’t think of myself as an expert in anything. I never set out to be any kind of authority. I just wanted to be left alone. At some point during every appointment she will remind me that getting well means accepting certain things about what has happened. It means understanding that my picture of the world is distorted. I find this hard to hear, and not just because I’m bored of listening to her say it. It is shameful to be a broken mechanism, to have to sit obediently while someone else goes about putting you right.
It’s not that I’m important or special, just that up until now there have been two tracks or timelines: the one that Rei and this little group of our friends live on, in which the future is predictable, an extrapolation from the past, a steady progression in which we are gradually turning into our own mothers and fathers, men and women who make plans and save for retirement, who go to our kids’ schools and participate in parent-teacher conferences, our adult bodies too big for the child-size furniture. Then there’s the second track, the occult track on which all this normality is a paper screen over something bloody and atavistic that is rising up out of history to meet us. I am the ragged membrane, the porous barrier between the two. Somehow, through me, through my negligence, the second track has contaminated the first. My madness, the madness for which I’ve been medicated and therapized and involuntarily detained, is about to become everyone’s madness. The proof of my sanity, my fitness to exist in the ordinary timeline of parent-teacher conferences and 401(k)s, was an acceptance that the two streams must never cross, that it was my job to keep them separate. I have not done that. Now all our throats are bared to the knife.
[...] We can and must act now to prevent that from happening -- and to redirect AI for the good of the many, not just the few.
just noting this because i groaned. YOU DONT HAVE THE RIGHT TO SAY THIS
[...] we should ask who negotiates the terms of these collaborations, and if teachers and factory workers will have any choice but to accept them. In reality automation is largely presented to workers as an ultimatum, a forced collaboration driven by a vision of efficiency defined by scale and statistical optimization.
Researchers in this area have talked about the need to move beyond explainability (seeking explanations for how an algorithm made a decision) to recourse (giving those impacted concrete actions they could take to change the outcome) and to move beyond transparency (insight to how an algorithm works) to contestability (allowing people to challenge it). In a recent op-ed for Nature, AI researcher Pratyusha Kalluri urges that we replace the question, "Is this AI fair?" with the question, "How does this shift power?"
nice, though i think we also need the radical third choice (luddism)
[...] Thinkers who identify with the Marxian tradition maintain that the category of distribution fails to capture the full depths of capitalist injustice because it neglects the relations of production and fails to problematize exploitation, domination, and commodification. [...]
not a bad point tbh (she seems to think recognition addresses this)
[...] The working class is the body of persons who must sell their labour power under arrangements that authorize the capitalist class to appropriate surplus productivity for its private benefit. The core injustice of these arrangements is exploitation, an especially deep form of maldistribution in which the proletariat's own energies are turned against it, usurped to sustain a system that benefits others. To be sure, proletarians also suffer serious cultural injustices the "hidden injuries of class." But far from being rooted directly in an autonomously unjust status order, these derive from the economic structure, as ideologies of class inferiority proliferate to justify exploitation. The remedy for the injustice, accordingly, is redistribution, not recognition. Overcoming class exploitation requires restructuring the political economy so as to alter the class distribution of benefits and burdens in the Marxian view, such restructuring takes the radical form of abolishing the class structure as such. The task of the proletariat, therefore, is not simply to cut itself a better deal, but "to abolish itself as a class." The last thing it needs is recognition of its difference. On the contrary, the only way to remedy the injustice is to put the proletariat out of business as a distinctive group.